Voice Attack – controlling games by speaking

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Voice control is one of those ideas which seems like it is just over the horizon. The Kinect almost offered it on the Xbox. Siri, Google Now and Cortana almost get there. Dragon Dictate works perfectly but only in very narrow circumstances.

I’ve been playing Elite Dangerous a lot in the evenings and I’ve invested in a Thrustmaster Flight Control Stick but the game can be so complicated I’ve been looking for something more. A little searching and I found a program called Voice Attack. Many years ago I was able to get an older version of Dragon Dictate to work with World of Warcraft but since then I’ve had little time or luck getting newer versions to work with games.

Voice Attack does not claim to be for dictation and if you want to chat it’s not going to be for you. What it does let you do is assign a particular key press or combination of key presses to a particular word or phrase and add audible feedback. Not grabbed? Watch the video below.

The player took off from a space station, raised landing gear, moved out of its mass shadow, lined up on the destination and jumped to FTL all via voice commands. Voice Attack can be set up entirely by the user or you can extra Voice Packs optimised for specific games. The software has a free 21 day trial and costs $8 around £5 for a full licence afterwards.

The software seems optimised for space simulators but there’s no reason it couldn’t be used for almost any program and with the free trial and low price it’s worth trying.